Paintings

The museum’s collection of post-1945 paintings is not large and features
mainly works from the 1950s and 1960s. A fine work by Adolph Gottlieb,
Black Enigma, is an example of his pictographic style of the late
1940s. The museum also owns several works by the late surrealist artist
Matta. A large canvas by Mark Rothko from 1953, Orange and Lilac over
Ivory, came into the collection as a gift of William Rubin, chief curator
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and another abstract expressionist
canvas by
Robert Motherwell was acquired after the artist’s death through the
Daedalus Foundation. A monument of Pop Art, Ed Ruscha’s Standard Station,
Amarillo, Texas, is the work in the collection most requested for loan; it
served as the signature image in a recent traveling retrospective. The museum
also possesses a large abstract triptych by
Fritz Glarner, a study for his mural for the Time-Life building in New York
City, a portrait by
Alice Neel of one of her son Hartley’s Dartmouth classmates, a large still
life by
Fernando Botero from the late 1960s, and a work that is combination of
painting and sculpture by Jennifer Bartlett titled
Fire Table. Ivan Albright, the magic realist famous for his portrait
of Dorian Gray used in the Hollywood film based on the novel, is represented by
a magnum opus that he worked on for almost a decade, titled The
Vermonter. Albright lived in nearby Woodstock for a number of years before
his death in 1983. Another nationally known artist that lives part of the year
in this region is
George Tooker, who is represented in the collection by several canvases and
works on paper, including Farewell, an image he made of his mother at
the time of her death. A large painting by Alex Katz, titled Supper,
shows friends dining at a table. Recently the museum purchased a lush and
vibrant contemporary work by Sean
Scully, an important canvas by
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and a 1967 painting by surrealist Dorothea
Tanning.